The special issue on Embodiment, Interactivity and Digital Performance explores questions, dialogues and themes emerging from the 2014 dancedigital Festival. Becoming more pervasive and diverse, digital dance practices propose new understandings of embodiment in which the practitioner negotiates a complex configuration of individual biological, experiential, social and technological data. What might be somatic experiences of these flows of information and energy that occur between and through the biological, experiential, social and the technological? Additionally, digital dance practices can encourage a mobility of collaborations across the disciplines that bring together the expertise, vision and innovation of artists, technologists, scientists and users in the creation of new art works.
We invite scholarly and artistic contributions to an exciting issue that will explore these discourses of embodiment, somatic experiences and the feeling of what happens in movement practices in a wide range of digital and interactive performance contexts.
Contributions might address the following questions and sub-themes of investigation:

Embodying Interactive Systems: Interactive stages create design systems that choreograph bodies, light and sound. How do these configure the embodied experiences of the dancer and the choices of the choreographer? What ways of knowing emerge from performance thinking and technological thinking?
Augmented reality and embodying public space:
Sensory technologies have the potential to re-organise and re-invent our experiences of the public space. The city can be re-configured as a play space of multiple reactive surfaces, textures and sounds that transform experiences of mobility and ambulation in time, space and body.

Audience Experiences of Embodiment: Interactive designs have the potential to engage audiences in new ways, sometimes incidentally, sometimes by invitation and sometimes by intervention. How do performance makers understand the role of the audience?

Changing Mobilities: How are new movement spaces of access and participation opened by the harnessing of digital technologies? How does the social create access to movement and participation in digital practices? What modes of embodiment are articulated in digital performance and how do they change perceptions of mobility?

Digital Futures: How will future generations create and participate in artwork? What will be the interests of future artists? What skills and training might prepare the next generation of digital dance artists?

Collaboration and Community Building: What is the nature of collaboration in digital performance and in the design and implementation of interactive performance systems? How do performance systems, scores and codes facilitate communication and what are the qualities of communities of practice? What are relationships between performance making and community building? How do artists and audiences navigate biological, experiential, social and technological information in performance contexts? How do contemporary performance practices address issues of collaboration, ownership, data, privacy and sharing?

Archiving and Access: How do digital archives affect audience experiences of dance? How are embodied knowledges communicated and transformed in the digital archiving process? How might the artist offer an accessible live archive of practice? What creative strategies can be used to facilitate meaningful audience engagements with archives and online performances?

Guidelines: Essays should be 4000-6000 words.
Shorter artistic reflections, conversations, poetry and provocations will also be considered.
Visual essays are encouraged.

Contributors need to work within the existing Journal template in terms of design and lay-out (see free issue). More playful contributions are welcomed, particularly those that include images, but if a contributor has a particular idea in mind that might deviate from the template they must contact Emma Meehan first to discuss the possibilities and prior to submitting a contribution that is necessarily dependent on a lay-out that deviates from the template.

Artist’s pages: Please submit a pdf with how you wish the article to appear in print, along with text (Word) and any images (tiff/jpeg/pdf, 300dpi) attached separately in the same email.

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Emma Meehan: ab4488@coventry.ac.uk

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editor: tamara.ashley@beds.ac.uk